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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/29807451">Wherever I Am</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/ShutUpandPull/pseuds/ShutUpandPull'>ShutUpandPull</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Absentia (TV)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Developing Relationship, F/M, One Shot, Romance</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2021-03-02</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2021-03-02</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-15 18:20:20</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>2,060</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/29807451</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/ShutUpandPull/pseuds/ShutUpandPull</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>It's the day of Cal's departure. What comes next?</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Emily Byrne/Cal Isaac</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>4</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>8</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Wherever I Am</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>I have no grand story to tell here, I’m afraid. These quiet moments came to be only because my brain sent me a line of dialogue I couldn’t seem to let go of.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Emily slipped back into darkened hotel room 227 that pre-dawn morning just as she’d slipped out of it hours before, when her work had called her from the bed that would be theirs together for too brief a time.</p>
<p>In but a few more ticks of the hour hand, she’d be watching him go, wishing she weren’t. She already knew that would be so, as she stood with her back pressed against the door he’d likewise disappear through, and she could only wonder, there in the blackness he’d brought light to, if she’d be able to summon the courage to alter the course of that bitter reality.</p>
<p>Just inside she lowered to one knee, unlaced her muddy, wet boots and pulled them off, left them there to dry below the vent in the ceiling that was blowing the most heavenly jet of warm air against her frigid bones. Winter’s night in that place was the cold of tales, far beyond that of her home, which she’d more than once longed for with an amused disbelief. Its winds were like needles mercilessly pricking her skin. Better than most ever would, she understood what that felt like.</p>
<p>Cal stirred in the bed when she managed herself upright and her hard-fought success came with a defiant groan. Six years in hell had taught her how to swallow pain for survival, how to numb her mind to it to help carry her body through. How many times since she’d relied upon that tool in her bag, a tool she both cherished and loathed, and yet like all things it too was cursed with imperfection.</p>
<p>When stillness fell again, she stripped out of her clothes--at once too few for the cold and too many to now have to contend with--and by the light of only the clock beside the bed found her way to the bathroom.</p>
<p>It’d begun to seem like every time she looked in the mirror, a different version of Emily Byrne was looking back. If it wasn’t some brand of disguise, it was a fresh bruise, a new scar, a bloodied this or that. Some she greeted welcomely. Others, the ones that plucked a nerve of memories better left in the dark, she slammed shut her eyelids on, as if such feeble defense ever managed to win her that game.</p>
<p>Tugging at the ends of the strip of her t-shirt she’d used to fashion a makeshift tourniquet, she leaned in for a closer inspection of the skin souvenir she’d carried back with her. The newest comer was ugly, certainly--more so than worrying, thankfully--and yet it somehow fit right in she thought. Just one more in a long line of one mores.</p>
<p>The inconsistent beat of the shower’s spray stung the gash on her neck and the scraped skin of her knuckles with its heat, but her knotted muscles purred with its touch. A waterfall of liquid red rushed down over her curves and disappeared into the drain, bringing one chapter complete and beginning another. She didn’t know what was to come next or where she’d be--for whom. She knew only that the uncertainty excited her, despite the heavy physical and emotional price she continued to pay for it.</p>
<p>After a while, she dried and wrapped herself in a towel, tucked it snug at her breast while she tended to her hair and then to her wound, which she bandaged crudely, enough to get by until she had time to clear the fog of fatigue. When she stepped out of the bathroom, the lamp beside Cal was on, he up and angled back against the bed’s headboard in wait.</p>
<p>“Sorry I woke you,” Emily said, stopping at the room’s edge. “I was cold.”</p>
<p>His eyes passed over the whole of her body. Elegant and strong, it both commanded and deserved such attention.</p>
<p>“You didn’t tell me you were going out.” Because, like hers, his needle rarely dipped below the red of vigilant, he’d woken when she had, yet he’d lay there, still, in unrealized--albeit flimsy--hopes she’d choose to clue him in, and he intended her to hear the lack of surprise over it in his voice. “Do you want me to look at that?”</p>
<p>Her fingers went to the covering she’d placed across her neck, glided gently over it. “Later,” she told him, and the promised amends quietly soothed them both. “I liked knowing you’d be here when I got back.”</p>
<p>Cal kicked away the covers, crawled beyond her vacant side of the bed, and seated himself at its edge. His skin was bare, just as she’d perpetrated and left it, and contrary to hers, perfect in its absence of the color palette of battle. Every part of him waited for her to come to him as he wanted but didn’t ask for.</p>
<p>And she did.</p>
<p>“Is there anything else?” He reached up and tugged at the knot in the towel until the cloth, weathered and frayed from repeated laundering, fell to the floor, pressed his lips to the flat of her belly before rotating her by the hips to examine for himself. “Byrne,” he whispered with relief when his forehead came to rest where he’d left his kiss. “Fuck, you’re beautiful.”</p>
<p>Emily slid her fingers into his hair, grabbed and held it at the back, and the recollection of their long-ago night on the train and that very act flashed across her mind and struck with a charge.</p>
<p>“You’re in my spot,” she teased and tugged him backward until he tipped. When he rolled clear, she climbed in and settled with her back to him. “I’m tired. I want to sleep.” She did want to. Feeling the comfort of his warmth, she also very much didn’t.</p>
<p>“We don’t always get what we want,” he remarked with the hint of a bite in his words.</p>
<p>The patchwork of scars that crisscrossed her back captured his gaze and flared his contempt for the evil that’d rendered it. Since he’d first laid eyes on their savage handiwork, the image had never been far from his mind, as with his own forever mark, which not only lived on his skin but on his heart.</p>
<p>“You’ve never asked,” she said after a time, after he’d allowed himself to trace the line of each as he hadn’t ever before.</p>
<p>His touch calmed her in a way no man’s ever had. In a way no other person’s ever had. That was the whole truth of it. Even curled there beside him, in the reality of him, trying to stifle the symphony of hums and sighs it was conducting inside of her, it amazed her how that could be, how it was he’d come into her life when he had, when she’d been in such desperate need of the uniqueness that was his counterbalance.</p>
<p>Cal’s hand came to rest along the curve of her hip. “Did you want me to?” He’d understood without explanation.</p>
<p>“I don’t know,” she replied, an honest answer after honest thought. Gingerly she came over onto her back. His hand rode the movement and lingered. “Some days I hate them. Some days I don’t know what I’d be now without them.” Turning her head on the pillow, their eyes met. “I can’t see them, but I always feel them.”</p>
<p>“I know,” he said because that was also his pain. “You didn’t hesitate for a second in Moldova, when I zipped your dress for you. You just turned and let me see like it was the hundredth time. I’ve been in combat, in the middle of war zones, and in that moment in that hotel room, I was sure I don’t have half the strength you have. I don’t even think it's close.”</p>
<p>“I could’ve told you that before the peep show,” Emily cracked around a grin.</p>
<p>“Oh, now is that what it was? Should I have tipped you after? Stuffed some singles into your--”</p>
<p>Her fingers bracketed his jaw and squeezed. “Watch it,” she warned playfully, her grip easing when a smile hit his eyes. “It was trust.” He kissed her palm when she didn’t pull her hand away. “I knew if you saw them, you’d still be able to see me, even if sometimes I can’t.”</p>
<p>And he knew better than to push it further with all she’d just given.</p>
<p>“What?” she said of the knot that grabbed hold of his brow.</p>
<p>He glanced over at the clock ticking away the minutes. “I don’t want to not see you.” He used her body to draw his in closer, rested his head below her breast. “Tell me what you want, Byrne.” His voice was soft and hopeful, despite effort--for her sake--to remain unsentimental.</p>
<p>“What I want,” slipped from her lips on a whisper like they were foreign words to her, as though it were the first time anyone had ever asked, and they transported her straight back to that basement with him months before, when he had her toes standing on a similar line and her heart wondering if it should pull her across. She’d let him go then. She’d had to endure the ache of it ever since.</p>
<p>“Am I supposed to just leave here and wait for the next postcard to come in the mail with the name of some cafe scribbled on the back? Is that how you want this go?”</p>
<p>Emily hesitated, but not out of uncertainty. What three nights beside him had shown her with even greater clarity than the months of nights she’d spent without him, was that despite its odd-shaped pieces, he fit her life. So much had been taken from her was what it was, that it often worried her how much she truly had left to give, and if it could be enough.</p>
<p>“I like what I’m doing, Cal. I’m good at it, and I’m going to keep doing it. I told you I’m not going back to Boston, but your job is there. Gunnarsen’s gone and you have the Bureau--with Crown, the way you want it.”</p>
<p>“Fuck my job,” he snapped, popping up to his elbow. “You think I’d choose the Bureau over this? Over being near you? You think I didn’t walk out of that place the second I knew where you were? I’m sure it’s easier for you to pretend you couldn’t be that important to someone and to hide behind some BS excuse, but you are that important to someone. Christ, if you’re scared, say you’re scared. Don’t put something on me that isn’t mine.”</p>
<p>Emily drew her eyes up to his, said calmly, “Are you done?” and nearly cracked a smile when his nostrils flared with a stiff inhale of frustration.</p>
<p>“You are such a pain in the ass, Byrne. Do you have to fight every damn thing?”</p>
<p>Both smiled then. And they laughed together.</p>
<p>She trailed a tender line down his neck to his chest. “You’re the beautiful one.”</p>
<p>“When you left it tore a hole through me,” he confessed for the first time. “I’m not looking to smother your life or what you’re doing with it, and I’m not down on one knee asking for a piece of paper or a picket fence, but before I go, I just need you to hear me say that you’re the one I want. Not the <em>you</em> you think you have to be, the you that comes with all the good, the bad, and the ugly.”</p>
<p>She curled her hand around the back of his neck, pulled him down to her. “I don’t want to not see you either,” she breathed against his lips and then kissed him deeply for the things he said and the things he could’ve said but didn’t. “And I’m not really a picket fence kind of girl, by the way. Maybe a dog, eventually.”</p>
<p>Letting his weight come over, Cal anchored between her legs and kissed his way from her lips to her heart, pausing to pay a special beat of loving attention to the site of her wound.</p>
<p>“How tired are you?” he asked.</p>
<p>The muscles of her thighs tightened around him in response.</p>
<p>“You’d better make it good. I’m going to need something to hold me over until you get back.”</p>
<p>“Yeah? Back where, exactly?”</p>
<p>Emily took a breath and steeled her voice.</p>
<p>“Wherever I am.”</p>
<p> </p>
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